Well, with the past week’s weather continuing to hold up any significant foray into the harvest, I guess a few of us might have a bit of a fellow feeling for those poor souls who find themselves trapped in the space station – in that a job we hoped might take a week or two now looks set to stretch out far longer than we’d expected.

And I guess, like us, while they’ll still have plenty to do in the way of maintenance and other jobs as they orbit far above the Earth, there’s bound to be disappointment and frustration at not being able to get on with the important things over a proper timescale.

Don’t mention the harvest

But at this time of year I often find myself almost quoting Basil Fawlty – and uttering “Don’t mention the harvest. I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it”.

For I’d be pretty sure that we’re not the only ones getting more than a bit peeved at the lack of progress in what doesn’t look set to be a stellar event this year as far as price and yields are concerned – and the weather has also been it’s doing its best to eat into the quality side now as well.

With just a couple of the early fields cut ourselves there’s certainly been a lack of big pleasant surprises in the way of yields from what have always looked like pretty lacklustre wheat crops, but I think that’ll be the second year this crop has opened the batting for us, rather than the mainstay spring barley.

With yields looking set to be well back across much of Europe, I don’t think Scotland will be alone on this front and I was reading an Irish farming paper which was putting out advice to growers to be careful what they claimed for yield – for fear of sending the more honest (or possibly realistic) growers deeper into the depression in which they were already likely to be entrenched.

So, let’s not rub any more salt into the wounds – and have a bit of a rant about something else instead.

Robust and resilient

Now, if this year is showing one thing it’s the fact that our current – and future – crops need to be a good deal more robust and resilient if they’re to continue being a viable proposition in the prevailing economic and, perhaps more importantly, meteorological climate.

So it’s been tough to find that we’re getting left further and further behind in this quest to breed new varieties and crops which will meet all the requirements we’re going to have to ask of them in the future due to the Scottish Government’s aversion towards precision breeding techniques such as gene-editing, an antipathy which seems to be based far more on sentiment than it does on the available science.

Last week’s SF article on the change of mind by the New Zealand government showed the sort of rational – but still cautious – approach to differentiating the regulatory burden placed on newer gene-edited crops as distinct from older, transgenic genetically modified organisms (GMO’s), one which our own administration could easily adopt.

Reap the benefits

Such a move would allow us to make some use of the world-leading science carried out in our own research centres and put it into practical effect in order to reap the benefits in our fields.

Another sure sign that we’re well at the coo’s tail on this one was the call in recent weeks made south of the Border for farmers to become involved in field trials to test out some of these precision-bred varieties to see how they coped under real-life commercial growing conditions.

Now, I’m aware that it hasn’t necessarily all been plain sailing in England since the enacting of the Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act 2023 which sees our cousins there taking some considerable steps towards a relaxing of the outdated regulatory approach imposed by Brussels on such crops several years ago.

For it seems that many of the proponents of the technologies have been disappointed at just how slowly the changes are being introduced – but, despite the slower than hoped for progress, it does mean that England is currently the only country in Europe where crops produced from these novel techniques can be grown in farmers’ fields.

So at least they’ve got themselves off the starting block, while we in Scotland are hanging about and have been told we won’t be doing anything until after the Europeans have finished their heats and come to a decision – and even then…

So we move on to what must surely be one of the better acronyms of recent years, the PROBITY study. For while painting itself with the underlying meaning of being morally and ethically correct, trustworthy, honest and upright, the acronym actually stands for a Platform to Rate Organisms Bred for Improved Traits and Yield (top marks to whoever thought that one up!).

The idea is to bring farmers, scientists and food manufacturers together to trial the production and processing of precision-bred crops in order to “accelerate understanding of their value to sustainable food and farming”. Led by the British On-Farm Innovation Network (BOFIN), it is a three-year, £2.2m multi-partner project, funded by Defra’s Farming Innovation Programme which is delivered by Innovate UK.

Onto commercial farms

The project will bring trials of precision-bred cereal crops onto commercial farms soon after the seed from trial plots was harvested earlier this month, with the first of these looking at a gene-edited wheat which, it is claimed, could lead to “greener” farming systems.

The wheat which was grown on from plots at the John Innes Centre has been multiplied up for use at field scale this year with the aim being to plant it on commercial farms in 2025 while another two varieties are set to come on tap a year later.

The aim is to multiply up the precision bred organism (PBO) grain from what started off as less than 1kg of seed to a 100t batch in just three years.

The crops will be tested by farmers in their fields alongside unedited controls and their farm standard varieties. Their progress in the field will be closely monitored while processed material will be intensely scrutinised – and the findings will be openly shared with the aim of assessing both how farmers feel about growing PBOs and how consumers feel about having food made with them.

The three varieties include a wheat which will have superior baking, toasting and processing properties, a barley which produces high lipid and high energy levels aimed at reducing the carbon footprint of animal feed, and a wheat with a bigger, bolder grain which is believed could result in a step change in productivity levels.

Rise to the challenge

“This is an incredibly important project for farming and food production in this country,” said Tom Allen-Stevens, Oxfordshire farmer and founder of BOFIN.

“We need to produce more nutritious food with fewer resources and with less impact on the environment. Scientists have been developing new crop varieties that could help us rise to that challenge.

This project will bring those varieties from the laboratory to farmers’ fields where we can fully assess their potential, explore barriers to their adoption and pave the way for future innovation.”

But, meanwhile, Scotland’s arable farmers can only watch from the sidelines…